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Picture winning the lottery for a moment. A really large sum, enough to clear the loan, replace the car, cut your working hours in half. Most people are fairly sure what would follow: life would get easier, brighter, contented to its core. In 1978 three psychologists at Northwestern University tested exactly that assumption, and their result has shifted our idea of what happiness actually is ever since.
The state of Illinois had just introduced a lottery. Philip Brickman and his colleagues tracked down twenty-two people who had won big in the previous year, each at least fifty thousand dollars, some as much as a million. On a scale from zero to five, they asked them how happy they were right now, and put the same question to a group of neighbours who hadn’t won. The winners came out at an average of 4.0, the neighbours at 3.82. The gap was so small it didn’t count statistically. A year after the big money, the winners were barely happier than the people next door.
Something else stood out more. The researchers had also asked how much pleasure the participants drew from everyday small things, from a conversation with friends or from breakfast. Here the winners scored measurably lower than the neighbours. Once you’ve felt the great high of the win, the ordinary morning afterwards looks paler. The extraordinary had devalued the ordinary.
And then Brickman and his colleagues did the thing that made their study famous. They compared the winners with people at the opposite end of fortune, with twenty-nine individuals left paraplegic after an accident. You’d expect an abyss of life satisfaction between a lottery win and a permanent paralysis. In fact the distance was startlingly small. The paralysed participants put their present happiness at 2.96, closer to the neighbours than you’d guess, and still on the positive side of the scale.
This is where the popular version of the story likes to overreach. It’s often said the paralysed group ended up just as happy as the winners. That isn’t true. 2.96 is not 4.0, and the gap to the neighbours was real. A heavy blow leaves marks that don’t simply dissolve. The distance was only far smaller than any intuition would price in, and that is the real finding. The paralysis made people less unhappy than we imagine, and the win made the others less happy. Both lives drifted towards the middle.
Why the New Becomes Normal
Psychologists call the mechanism behind this habituation, or more precisely adaptation. Our sense of things has no fixed zero point. It always measures against what we’ve grown used to. The first salary that struck you as generous is, two years on, the self-evident bank balance that excites nobody. The new flat that felt like a small step up at first is soon just the flat. Every gain lifts the level at which we measure the next one, and with it lifts the threshold above which we feel any joy at all.
Brickman found the image of the hedonic treadmill for this. You run and you strain and yet you don’t move from the spot, because the floor beneath you keeps pace with exactly the speed you pick up. On top of that comes the second effect the winners felt. A great high resets the yardstick for everything smaller. To someone who has just won big, an unexpected twenty that would once have pleased them suddenly counts for almost nothing. The peak experience pulls the comparison upward and leaves the rest of life looking dull beside it.
The Next Thing
You don’t have to win the lottery to know the treadmill, you’ve been running on it for a while. The phone you saved half a year for is, after three weeks, simply the phone in your pocket. The promotion that felt like a leap is, a quarter later, the familiar desk where the next rung already beckons. We call this progress, and in some respects it is. It’s just that the happiness we promise ourselves from it rarely lasts as long as the road there did.
Daniel Kahneman described the underlying error neatly. As long as you’re dwelling on something, it swells to fill the whole picture, and almost nothing in life deserves as much weight as it seems to have in that moment. While you’re imagining the raise, it’s everything. In real life it’s then a small part of a day made of a hundred other things, from the weather in the morning to the traffic on the way home. Anticipation overrates itself, because it makes the one thing large and blanks out all the rest.
What Doesn’t Belong on the Treadmill
It would be a convenient and fairly bleak conclusion to draw from this: in the end you land back at the same level of happiness anyway, so you might as well not bother. It isn’t that simple, and more recent research has made that clear. Habituation is powerful, yet it isn’t total. Long-term data over years show that some blows really do leave lasting marks. Prolonged unemployment or the loss of someone close often pushes the level down for years, without it finding its own way back.
The other way round, not every good thing wears off at the same speed. You got used to a bigger car within a few months. To work that means something to you, or to a person who is close to you, you never quite get used to, because neither is exhausted in a single moment of acquisition. They happen anew every day, and each time they give something back.
That’s where the usable part of the treadmill lies. It runs most reliably under the things you can buy, count and compare with the neighbours. With whatever resists being turned into a number, it runs more slowly or not at all. Someone who knows the difference might look twice at the next purchase, at what in it will really carry them and what only raises the threshold from which they’ll want the thing after that.
What We Fear Too Much
The same mechanism has a second direction, and that one is a consolation. What makes the win fade also, over time, softens the loss. It was already visible in the accident victims, who were markedly less unhappy than anyone would have thought possible. Habituation works downward as well as upward, drawing great misfortune gradually closer to what can still be borne.
The catch is that we can’t see this force in ourselves beforehand. Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson have shown that people routinely overestimate the pain of future blows, in duration as in force. Those asked were convinced that a denied tenure or a lost election would weigh on them for years. In fact they recovered far faster than they had credited themselves with. Gilbert calls the reason the psychological immune system, a quiet machinery of reinterpreting and carrying on that kicks in once things get serious, and that we simply leave out when we predict.
This doesn’t undo what stood a moment ago, some blows really do leave marks that last for years. But in everyday life the more common error is the other one. We trust our own resilience too little, and steer whole decisions around avoiding a pain that, as long and as large as we picture it, we wouldn’t in the end actually live through.
What Slows the Treadmill Down
There’s a remedy against habituation that goes against most people’s grain, because it’s the opposite of what we instinctively do. We try to hold on to the good, ideally without a break and always within reach. That is exactly what feeds the treadmill. Habituation lives off a steady stream, and whatever interrupts the stream brings the intensity back.
Leif Nelson and Tom Meyvis showed this with something everyone thinks they hate. In their studies, participants watched an episode of the sitcom “Taxi”, some in one go, others with commercial breaks. Afterwards it was the ones with the ads who found the episode more enjoyable, even though all of them had found the interruptions annoying. The break disrupted the habituation, and the pleasure then started up again at full strength. The same holds in reverse: interrupt something unpleasant and it feels worse afterwards. The pause amplifies whatever is running.
From this follows something you can apply at once, and it feels wrong at first. What you love, you shouldn’t run through in one stretch. The series you devour gives you less than the same series in portions. The favourite song on a loop wears thin, a week’s break makes it sound new again. It’s the brief absence that keeps a thing alive, and the constant availability that snuffs it out. Seen that way, the lottery win was a worst case, uninterrupted access to everything and with it the fastest form of going numb.
An exercise for the coming week: Thinking It Away
Take a good thing in your life, nothing spectacular, more something you’ve long taken for granted, a person who matters to you, or the place you live. And then think it away for a few minutes. This is less about the loss than about the step before it. Go through the chain of chances by which it almost never came about, the meeting that nearly didn’t happen, the turn where things could just as easily have gone another way, and how close you came to none of it existing.
It sounds like a detour, and that’s exactly where the trick is. Minkyung Koo and Daniel Gilbert have shown that this picturing of the absence stirs more appreciation than the usual listing of what you have. It pulls a good thing back out of the obviousness that habituation has dragged it into.
The lottery winners of 1978 ended up with everything one could wish for, available at any time and without a break, and that is precisely what made the ordinary morning pale for them. Perhaps more of our happiness sits in the interruptions than in whatever stands permanently within reach.
What would you miss today if it suddenly weren’t there?
Sources
- Brickman, P., Coates, D. & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927.
- Brickman, P. & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society. In M. H. Appley (Hrsg.), Adaptation-Level Theory (S. 287–305). Academic Press.
- Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N. & Stone, A. A. (2006). Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion. Science, 312(5782), 1908–1910.
- Lucas, R. E., Clark, A. E., Georgellis, Y. & Diener, E. (2003). Reexamining Adaptation and the Set Point Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(3), 527–539.
- Lucas, R. E., Clark, A. E., Georgellis, Y. & Diener, E. (2004). Unemployment Alters the Set Point for Life Satisfaction. Psychological Science, 15(1), 8–13.
- Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J. & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638.
- Nelson, L. D., Meyvis, T. & Galak, J. (2009). Enhancing the Television-Viewing Experience through Commercial Interruptions. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(2), 160–172.
- Koo, M., Algoe, S. B., Wilson, T. D. & Gilbert, D. T. (2008). It’s a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events Improves People’s Affective States, Contrary to Their Affective Forecasts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1217–1224.
